Cheryl Phillips

Cheryl Phillips specializes in data journalism and investigative journalism that uses data. She focuses in her classes on creating a newsroom-like, project-based environment where students analyze data, report out stories and in some instances partner with professional news organizations.

Cheryl Phillips has been teaching journalism at Stanford since 2014 and is a founding member of the Stanford Computational Journalism Lab. She is involved in a cross-departmental effort with Sharad Goel, an Assistant Professor at Stanford in the Department of Management Science & Engineering, to collect police interaction data and evaluate racial disparities. The effort, called the Stanford Open Policing Project, is then working to share that data with journalists and researchers. Cheryl also is a member of the California Civic Data Coalition, A collaboration among data journalists to open up California campaign finance data and make it more accessible. Previously, she worked at The Seattle Times for 12 years. Her most recent position in Seattle was as Data Innovation Editor. In that role, she analyzed data for stories, facilitated online storytelling and coordinated newsroom data journalism training. She also was the deputy investigations editor, an assistant metro editor and an investigative reporter at The Seattle Times. In 2014, she was involved in coverage of a landslide that killed 43 people and was particularly focused on collecting and using data to help cover the story. That coverage received a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news. In 2009, she was the lone editor in the newsroom when four police officers were shot at a coffee shop and was integrally involved in the subsequent coverage of the shooting and 30-hour manhunt for the suspect. That work by the newsroom received a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news. She also has twice been on teams that were Pulitzer finalists. She has worked at USA Today and at newspapers in Michigan, Montana and Texas.

Cheryl has taught data journalism and data visualization at the University of Washington and Seattle University. She also served for 10 years on the board of directors for Investigative Reporters and Editors, a grass roots training organization for journalists and she is a former IRE board president. She currently serves on an advisory board for Tableau Public, a data visualization software tool. Twitter: @cephillips